The Help is a big, old-fashioned tearjerker of a film, full of
reckonings and reconciliation.

An adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s novel set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the Sixties, The Help is a big, old-fashioned tearjerker of a film, full of reckonings and reconciliation.

If it contains much that’s undoubtedly true about the relations between Southern whites and their black domestic staff, then it also approaches that era with a firm desire to make good in fiction its injustices: a desire that extends to tweaking and smoothing the plot until – like a well-made bed – it promises to let us rest easy.

That is not, however, to cast doubt on the power of its performances, or the compelling force of its narrative. It opens with the voice of a black maid called Aibeleen Clarke (played by Viola Davis, whose mesmerising gaze alone could carry a film), who has over the years raised 17 white children in the households of her various employers.

She has watched as the innocent adoration of the children for her slowly becomes infused with the poisonous politics of race, whereby she’s gradually relegated from the warm human heart of their world to the chilly status of a “coloured” employee.

The current batch of young white women, raised by black maids, seem – thanks, perhaps, to the whiff of change in the air – to be more zealously racist than even their mothers’ generation, particularly when they fall under the influence of Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), a gimlet-eyed horror show in frosted lipstick and a floral dress. Her political awareness extends to campaigning vigorously for compulsory separate lavatories for white families and their black employees.

The exception to the rule is Skeeter (Emma Stone), a ringleted bluestocking whose ambitions lie in journalism and writing, and who decides to ask the maids to tell, anonymously, of their own stories and feelings: the results will be sent to a New York publisher.

At first, no one will chance it. Then, Aibeleen and her rebellious friend Minny (Octavia Spencer, full of both rage and comic verve) gradually grow excited by the rare opportunity of truth-telling, after so many years of biting their tongues, and the project becomes a real and risky possibility (albeit one in which, as ever, the maids have more to lose than Skeeter).

Tate Taylor’s script and direction is at its strongest while exploring the painful paradoxes and power-shifts between maid and employer: the physical intensity of the relationship between white children and the black “help”, who constantly cuddles and soothes them, while the adult white women – immobilised and emotionally withered by social codes – shrink from touching either maids or children.

Striking, too, is the way that a maid’s apparent status as a long-standing family member can evaporate with a single dismissive word.

Davis and Spencer command the most powerful scenes, their bodies sometimes trembling with the effort of restraining the statements which natural justice demands (and which come spilling out in an unforgettable show-down between Aibeleen and Hilly).

Elsewhere, the characterisations of the white women feel a little too broad-brush: the excitable Marilyn-esque bombshell (Jessica Chastain) who is marginalised by the snobbish society girls, the outstandingly loathsome Hilly, the earnest Skeeter.

Revenge is doled out with a side helping of broad scatological comedy. And yet The Help picks its audience up and carries it forcefully along in its engrossing, sympathetic, moving wake: and then, like all the best nursemaids, it lulls us to sleep with a large spoonful of syrup.